Photo and/or video captures are an important use for smartphones and tablet devices, as well as any personal electronic device with a photo and/or video capture capability. An exemplary video sensor may be used in a video capture apparatus to capture and digitize a photograph or video as a digital photograph and a digital video, respectively. However, a video capture apparatus found in a portable electronic device may suffer from a high degree of sensor noise, especially in non-ideal lighting conditions. For example, when a lighting level is low, a sensor tends to introduce noise as there is not enough light to adequately represent the scene. The end result is a captured image or video with a quantity of noise on top of the image or video. Unacceptable levels of noise may also be found in a preview display output as well.
Noise introduced into video data may result in further noise or video artifacts during digitization. A video encoder, which digitizes the video data produced by the sensor, has limits on the amount of noise it is able to handle. When noise is introduced into the video, the resulting output of the video encoder may be a digitized video with additional noise and artifacts. In other words, the captured video data may have more noise and artifacts introduced into it because of the initial level of noise in the video, such that the quality of the captured video may be even worse than the quality of the preview display video.
Processing captured video to reduce the levels of noise introduced into the video may significantly improve the quality of the overall video capture process. The noise levels in the captured video may be reduced through noise filtering. However, the extent of the noise filtering may be limited by the processing capability of the video capture apparatus. Not only is the processing capabilities of a video capture apparatus found in a portable electronic device limited, an amount of time available for budgeting towards real-time processing of the captured video by the video capture apparatus is also limited.